If you want to know how I arrived at this conclusion it’s mostly the same process as And the most engaging JISC Project is…, but as well as getting social bookmark/share counts I’m also counting the number of post comments (an important part of engagement).

Counting comments

It actually took two methods. Knowing that WordPress blogs have a comment rss feed for each post I initially grabbed this and snaffled the number of comment items (at the same time I grabbed the post title, as the sitemap.xml doesn’t have this info). Here’s the code for getting comment counts from comment rss feeds.

Bonus – Topsy tweet data

In my previous post I mentioned how I used the Topsy service to get a secondary tweet count. As well as the link share count Topsy also keep a record of the tweet which made. This data is also accessible via their Topsy (Otter) API as part of trackbacks. As Tony has done a lot of work with community visualisation (some posts here) I thought that as I was querying Topsy I should grab the tweets and dump them in a separate sheet in their JSON format (I should say that unless you start paging the results the maximum you’ll get is 50 tweets).

For example, using the PostRank formula I calculated that OUseful.info has generated $20,393.25 in ‘engagement’ which I think is a gross underestimate. Considering the number of things I’ve learned and followed up as a direct result of Tony’s work he’s due a sizeable cut from any ‘engagement value’ generated from this site.

Disclaimer

The views I express here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or any other party.

All code, applications and templates on this site are distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.